AAP to move court after RS Chairman accepts merger of 7 MPs with BJP

AAP plans legal challenge after Rajya Sabha Chairman accepts merger of seven MPs with BJP, sparking debate over anti-defection law provisions

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Monday said that it will move court if Rajya Sabha Chairman C P Radhakrishnan does not take cognisance of its petition demanding that its seven Members of Parliament (MPs), led by Raghav Chadha, should be disqualified under the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution for violating the anti-defection law. Of the AAP’s 10 MPs in the RS, seven announced on Friday that they were joining the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

 

The RS Chairman on Monday officially accepted the merger of the seven AAP MPs with the BJP. The Rajya Sabha website reflected the changed strength of the two parties. The BJP’s numbers in the Upper House have increased to 113, which is 10 short of the majority mark in the 245-member House. The AAP, which, with 10 MPs, was the fourth-largest party in the RS until last week (after the BJP, Congress, and Trinamool Congress), is now reduced to three MPs in the Upper House.

 

 

Of the seven MPs that crossed over to the BJP, six are from Punjab, where Assembly polls are due by February–March 2027. In the 2022 Assembly polls in the state, the AAP had unseated the Congress from power. The Congress on Monday flagged how AAP gave RS tickets not to party workers and leaders, but on the basis of money. Senior Congress leader and party treasurer Ajay Maken alleged that the AAP worked as a proxy of the BJP to counter the Congress in states like Punjab and Gujarat. He alleged the net worth of each of the seven MPs who have left the AAP for the BJP comes to ₹818 crore.

 

Raghav Chadha, Ashok Mittal, Harbhajan Singh, Sandeep Pathak, Vikramjit Sahney, Swati Maliwal, and Rajinder Gupta are the seven MPs who merged with the BJP. Mittal is the owner of Jalandhar’s Lovely Professional University. Sahney is an entrepreneur, Gupta is an industrialist, and Harbhajan Singh is a former international cricketer. AAP Lok Sabha MP from Punjab's Anandpur Sahib, Malvinder Singh Kang, on Monday alleged that some of the seven were “scared of central agencies like the Enforcement Directorate (ED). They switched sides to save their businesses.” Mittal had faced a raid earlier this month.

 

AAP’s RS MP Sanjay Singh said, “The (Rajya Sabha) Chairman has taken cognisance of the letter submitted by those seven MPs and, based on that, accepted their merger. The objections raised by us and the disqualification we sought under the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution (in the petition submitted on Sunday to the Chairman) have not even been considered.” Singh said the AAP was hopeful that once its letter is examined, the Chairman would act in favour of the Constitution and democracy by disqualifying the seven members. "If that does not happen, we will approach the court. It is wrong to break a party in this manner," he said.

 

Constitutional experts, such as former Lok Sabha secretary general P D T Achary and Supreme Court advocate and former Union law minister Kapil Sibal, have questioned the merger.

 

Sibal said the merger of the AAP MPs into the BJP is unconstitutional since the law permits it only if the party is merged first. The Constitution says that first the political party must take a decision at the organisational level, pass a resolution deciding that, as a political party, it wants to merge with the BJP, and only then can it be done. The party merges first and then the MPs; the opposite cannot happen, Sibal said, adding that it is against Schedule 10 of the Constitution.

 

The two have pointed to paragraph 4 of the 10th Schedule, which states, “A member of a House shall not be disqualified... where his original political party merges with another political party and he claims that he and any other members of his original political party have become members of such other political party or, as the case may be, of a new political party formed by such merger”.

 

In his social media post on X, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju said the RS Chairman has accepted the merger of the seven MPs with the BJP, and welcomed the seven MPs into the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).